When the Snow Falls

by Fern Michaels

  “Thank you,” I said to Roberta as I heard the sound of approaching sirens.

  “You were right about the candles,” she said woefully. “I’m so sorry. I was making us dinner. I wanted to say how much I appreciated everything before I left. Gary and I are giving it another try.”

  “You are?” We stepped back, out of the way, as the fire trucks turned into my long drive.

  “I went to see him last night, and . . . well, Christmas Eve eve is still our special time.”

  So, that’s why she’d come in so late, I realized. “Good,” I said, pleased for her.

  I couldn’t stand seeing my cottage in flames. I wanted to smash my way inside to save something, but my dog was safe and my laptop was still at the off ice, so I still had everything that really mattered to me.

  I gave The Binks an extra hug and she licked my face in commiseration.

  Epilogue

  The fire department got the flames under control fairly quickly, though my home was a dripping mess of water in the end. Apart from some smoke damage, the bedroom and kitchen were saved. The living room, though, was a complete disaster, and my furniture, such as it was, was ruined. The firemen cut holes in the roof for ventilation, and the snow kept coming down and melting as it reached the heat, adding to the moisture. It was just as well Roberta and Gary had reconciled because nobody was going to be sleeping on my couch ever again.

  It was also lucky for Chuck, I supposed, that he wasn’t the owner of the home. Hopefully skinflint Ogilvy had insurance.

  I’d called Dwayne, and he arrived about the same time as the police and the EMTs, who hauled Karen away in an ambulance. Her Glock was recovered, and its chamber was found to be empty of ammunition. It kind of pissed me off. If I’d known that, my house might not be ruined, but then, Karen hadn’t been polite enough to point out that she was faking.

  There were a lot of questions from the police. I knew one of the Lake Chinook officers and he helped facilitate my being allowed to leave. I wasn’t exactly sure where that was going to be until Dwayne said, “I’ll take you to my place,” in one of the tenderest tones he’d ever used in my hearing. It made me feel a little weak in the knees, and I had to tell myself that it was probably just an aftereffect of the wrestling match I’d engaged in with Karen, but I didn’t believe it.

  I was still holding The Binkster as Dwayne put a supportive arm around me and we walked toward his truck. My brain focused on that contact as if there was nothing else in the world to think about. We’d almost made it when another vehicle came bouncing up my rutted drive, a thin layer of snow on its roof and melting off the hood. Darcy’s white BMW.

  “Oh, no,” I murmured, as I set The Binkster in the passenger seat of Dwayne’s truck.

  “I called her on the way over,” Dwayne admitted. “Darcy’d been trying to get hold of you and finally called me.”

  “Jane!” Darcy cried, racing from the car toward me. I shrank back as a matter of course, and Dwayne tucked me in closer. “My God, are you okay?”

  “Karen Aldridge did this?” James asked in disbelief, staring at the blackened roof and smoke still curling upward.

  “Oh, it’s my fault!” Darcy pressed her mittened hands to her cheeks. “It’s all my fault.”

  “She was trying to scam you,” I said. I’d already told Dwayne a bit of what had occurred, but now I related the entire tale to Darcy and James. I was shivering before I finished, and Dwayne had to cut me off and steer me toward the passenger seat of his truck.

  “We’ll figure it out tomorrow,” he said.

  “What about the house?” Darcy asked, staring at my smoking cottage.

  “Hopefully my landlord has insurance.”

  “Maybe we can buy it for you,” Darcy declared instantly, and James seconded, “Absolutely,” as if it were a done deal.

  Did they see the horror on my face? Probably not, because I ducked my head as I climbed into the truck. I didn’t even have the energy to protest.

  “Looks like no dinner tonight,” Darcy said, sounding disappointed. “Maybe we should reschedule for New Year’s?”

  I found the energy to pick up The Binks and take my seat. Then Dwayne slammed the door on the driver’s side and we were on the way to his house. I thrust my hands into the pockets of my coat to get them warm and discovered the little bits of mistletoe from our trip to Gil’s farm, which felt like a million years ago.

  I walked into the house on my own power, though I was definitely feeling shaky, and put The Binks on the floor. A bottle of red wine with a bow sat on Dwayne’s breakfast bar.

  “Sit down before you fall down and I’ll get you a drink,” he said, grabbing the bottle.

  “Isn’t it a gift?”

  “To you and me, to christen our new office and for Christmas. Bought it from Wine About It. What’s that?”

  My gaze followed the direction of his and I realized he was looking at the mistletoe sprig crushed in my hand. “A parasite. I got a lot of those lately.”

  Dwayne set the bottle back down, then came to me and eased the mistletoe from my nerveless fingers. He held it over our heads and my eyes met his.

  “What? You’re not . . .”

  For an answer, Dwayne leaned down and kissed me. It was a nice kiss. A pleasant one. When he pulled back, there was a moment of reckoning in which neither of us said anything. My heart was jumping around in my chest as if it didn’t know where to go.

  And then a car pulled up outside and a couple of doors slammed. There was a pounding at the door and, muttering under his breath, Dwayne reluctantly opened it.

  Darcy and James burst in with armloads of presents. “We had them at the house. We were going to give them to you tomorrow, since tonight was such a mess, but then we thought, no, let’s celebrate! Oh, Jane, you must be totally tired. We’ll only stay a little while. We can do something tomorrow. It’ll be a white Christmas. Maybe we could go to Timberline Lodge and drink mountain drinks.”

  “Or take a sleigh ride,” James said.

  “Or have a snowball fight!” She glanced from Dwayne to me. “What do you say?”

  “Oh, goody?” I suggested.

  Darcy plowed on. “I put a call into my real-estate agent and told him I wanted to buy your house. We’ll get that started, too.”

  I looked at Dwayne and he looked at me. Parasites, I thought, but I was beginning to have a new appreciation for them. They might even be okay.

  Dear Reader,

  She’s baaaaaccckkk!

  One of my most asked-about characters, P.I. Jane Kelly, has finally returned in White Hot Christmas. Where has she been? Perched on a shelf in my mind, just waiting to get back on the page. In real time, it’s been a number of years, but in Jane’s world, it’s only been a few weeks.

  Jane first burst on the scene in Candy Apple Red, as the reluctant apprentice to her boss, Dwayne Durbin, whom she’s been friends with for years. She fights a kind of should I or shouldn’t I battle inside herself over whether she and Dwayne should take their relationship to the next level. She knows it’s a bad idea. They work together, for crying out loud, but then, Jane’s never really listened to her own advice. This same question follows her through the second and third books in the trilogy, Electric Blue and Ultra Violet, and it crops up again in White Hot Christmas. While she struggles to keep herself from making that big mistake, she also deals with her family, her adopted pug, The Binkster, and the general lowlifes who populate her working world. All three books are available as eBooks, if you’re interested in learning more!

  What have I been doing while Jane was waiting to reappear? I’ve been concentrating on creating romantic suspense thrillers, some with my sister, Lisa Jackson, and some on my own. My latest solo effort, I’ll Find You, now available, centers around Callie Cantrell, who’s suffered the tragic loss of her son in a car accident and is struggling to find herself again. The healing starts when she befriends a little boy on the island of Martinique. Tucker seems to be a wharf rat at first, bu
t Callie soon realizes he has a mysterious past of his own. Without meaning to, Callie becomes embroiled in the dirty dealings, dark secrets and hidden agendas of the members of the wealthy Laughlin family, a situation that could prove deadly to both Callie and Tucker.

  Before the year ends, I’ll have one more book out: Wicked Ways. It’s one of the stories I’m cowriting with Lisa Jackson, and it’s the fourth book in the Colony series, which features the women of Siren Song, who possess mysterious psychological “gifts.” Siren Song is the name of the lodge along the Oregon coast where many of the Colony women reside, but in Wicked Ways, we take a trip to sunny Southern California to find a missing member who doesn’t know of her connection to the others. Elizabeth Gaines Ellis is living a normal suburban lifestyle south of Los Angeles but has noticed that when she wishes for something, sometimes it actually comes true. The problem is, she’s made the mistake of wishing someone dead . . . her cheating husband . . . and it looks like her wish has been granted....

  Hope you enjoy White Hot Christmas and have lots of time for happy holiday reading!

  Nancy Bush

  Seven Days of Christmas

  ROSANNA CHIOFALO

  Prologue

  Newport, Rhode Island

  Christmas has always coincided with some major milestone in my life. Perhaps it’s because I was born on Christmas Eve. There was a raging blizzard the day I was born and so my parents thought it would be fitting to name me Bianca, which means white in Italian.

  My parents took me and my brothers to Disney World for the first time when I was seven. It was my first real vacation. We spent Christmas and the week leading up to New Year’s Eve in Orlando. As a child who lived in Newport, Rhode Island, I had been accustomed to the cold and often snowy Christmases New England is known for. So being in mild, sunny Florida felt odd at first. But that was all forgotten when I entered Disney’s magical world and met my favorite princesses. I’m still trying to decide which one I like more—Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. My mom says it should be Snow White because my name is Bianca and I have chocolate-brown hair just like her.

  Then there was my first kiss from Frank O’Mara on the morning of Christmas behind our church, right after Mass. I was only fourteen and couldn’t have asked for a better gift than to have Frank finally notice me. Little did I know then that he had noticed—and kissed—almost all the girls in our high school. Still. It’s one of my most fond Christmas memories. What girl doesn’t remember her first kiss?

  My maternal grandmother, or Nonna, as my brothers and I called her, died the day after Christmas when I was eighteen. She had lived with my family for the past eight years, since my grandfather died of a heart attack. I was devastated and didn’t want to return to college after the holidays. Of course, my parents made me go back, telling me Nonna would want me to continue on the path God had laid out for me. That did sound like something Nonna would say. She was very religious and often found a way to insert God and her favorite saints into whatever lesson she was imparting to my brothers and me. Nonna’s favorite saint was Saint Rita, which also happens to be my mother’s name. My favorite saint was Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. My grandmother was thrilled I had chosen this saint because of her own Austro-Bavarian roots. Nonna and Nonno were both from Bolzano, in the South Tyrol region of Italy, where the Italian Alps meet the Austrian Alps. Although they were Italian, they were of Austro-Bavarian heritage and also spoke German.

  But I had chosen Saint Elizabeth as my favorite because she had been a princess. She was a princess of the kingdom of Hungary in the thirteenth century. Like most little girls, I was obsessed with princesses. So maybe that’s why I wasn’t surprised when I met Mark Vitale and our romance seemed to take on a fairy-tale quality of its own.

  I met Mark last year on Christmas Eve. My brothers, Antonio and Luciano—or Tony and Lucky—brought Mark home for our special Feast of the Seven Fishes. Mark is Tony and Lucky’s boss and the owner of the architectural firm where they work. Although Tony and Lucky aren’t twins and were born two years apart—Tony is thirty, while Lucky is twenty-eight—they have many of the same interests, one being architecture. They went to Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and became architects.

  At first, I thought it was odd that they were bringing their boss home for our holiday dinner. But Mom explained to me that Mark was very easygoing and is Tony and Lucky’s friend in addition to their boss. Call me uptight, but I’m a firm believer in the old adage, “Don’t mix business with pleasure.” But Tony and Lucky are grown men. They can ruin their careers if they want. It’s none of their little sister’s business.

  I was helping Mom cook the seven fish that we would be having for dinner: baccalà (or codfish, as it’s more commonly known in English), crab legs, clams, mussels, scallops, fresh sardines, and octopus when Tony and Lucky arrived with Mark in tow.

  “Bianca, can you please go out to ask Mark if he’d like something to drink? I don’t know what’s taking your father so long at that liquor store. You’d think he was shopping for the entire week’s worth of groceries.” Mom shook her head as she lowered a ladle full of clams into a huge pot of boiling fish stock. Although she lived for the holidays, she always got stressed beyond stressed preparing for them.

  “Give Daddy a break, Mom. It is Christmas Eve. The liquor store must be busy.”

  “True, but I also know how your father loves to linger and examine every wine and liquor bottle to make sure he’s getting only the best. He’s probably having some extended conversation about grapes and wine making with the store clerks.”

  “He’ll be home soon. Don’t worry.” I patted Mom on the back before pulling my apron over my head.

  As I made my way to the living room, I could hear Tony and Lucky telling Mark some of their more obnoxious jokes. I rolled my eyes as I imagined this night resembling more of a frat-boy party rather than a family holiday celebration.

  I stepped into the living room. Mark’s back was facing me. He was quite tall, maybe six foot one, with curly, dark brown hair. I was surprised to see he was wearing jeans, although they were a dark wash and looked very expensive. A midnight-blue silk shirt complemented the jeans perfectly. He was telling Tony and Lucky about an intern he’d hired who had been making mistake upon mistake. I waited until he was done with his story before interrupting.

  “Excuse me?”

  Mark turned around. His eyes narrowed slightly as he took me in. I was at a loss for words. I hadn’t expected Mark to be so good-looking. He raised his eyebrow as if to ask me yes? but when he saw I was having a hard time gathering my thoughts, he quickly came to my rescue.

  “Where are my manners? You must be Bianca. Tony and Lucky are always raving about you.” Mark stepped forward and shook my hand.

  I smiled and glanced at my brothers, who seemed amused at my awkward moment. Trying to save face, I said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mark. As for my brothers, they’re the ones lacking in manners.” I turned my attention to Tony and Lucky. “How long were you going to wait to introduce me to Mark?”

  “You have a mouth, Bianca. What’s gotten into you tonight?” Lucky winked at me.

  I ignored him and asked Mark, “Would you like something to drink? We have Merlot, or I could make you a cocktail. I’m not sure which liquor my father has in his bar. He’s actually at the liquor store right now, so you’ll have more of a choice when he gets back. He should be home soon if you’d rather wait.”

  “A glass of Merlot would be great. Thank you. Oh! I almost forgot, Bianca. I brought dessert. You should probably put it in the fridge.” Mark walked over to the coffee table and picked up a box from Gianni’s Dolci—Newport’s best bakery—and handed it to me. Our fingers brushed lightly as he made the transfer.

  “Thank you. You didn’t have to bring anything.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” Mark smiled.

  While he had smiled at me earlier, something about this smile seemed different. Warmth spread from the pit of my b
elly all the way up to my face. I returned his smile, doing my best to keep my expression as disinterested and cool as possible, before turning around and walking over to the liquor cabinet. Though I heard them resume their conversation, I got the sense Mark was glancing in my direction. I turned my body to the side as I poured his Merlot into a wineglass and snuck a glance. Sure enough, he was doing his best to appear as if he were paying attention to what Tony and Lucky were saying, but he looked my way twice. He didn’t notice I was looking at him as well—probably because he was staring at my legs.

  Men used to tell me often that my legs were my best asset. I silently thanked myself for choosing a navy-blue pencil skirt, which sat a good three inches above my knees. And my embroidered black silk stockings showed off my toned calves, thanks to my regular workouts. Keeping in spirit with the Yuletide, I wore patent leather stiletto pumps in candy red to go with a sleeveless, sequined top in the same shade. My short-cropped hair sported a small comb with faux rubies. I knew without a doubt that I looked good, and from the appreciative expression in Mark’s eyes as he stared at me, he thought so too.

  While I made my way back to Mark with his wine, it was now his turn to act nonchalantly, pretending he didn’t notice I was approaching him.

  “Here’s your Merlot, Mark.” I said his name in a hushed whisper and met his gaze. He paused, holding my gaze for a moment longer before taking his glass.

  “Tony, Lucky, can I get you something to drink?” I asked my brothers.

  “Nah. We’ll wait for Dad to bring home the hard stuff.”

  “Aren’t you going to have a glass of wine, Bianca?”